Tag Archives: Schumacher

Like belief in God, money has such a hold on most people’s world view that it is difficult to question, much more to dislodge. Atheists must face a similar challenge even having a rational conversation with theists. The problem with changing conditioning is that people are not aware that they are conditioned in the first place, like alcoholics who are not aware, and do not acknowledge, that they have a problem.

Economists and presumably well-educated correspondents with whom the PANACEA concept has been shared, have been unanimous in ignoring it. I can only conjecture that they recoil in pity and disbelief at the ravings of a clearly unbalanced mind, or that it is so completely outside their frame of reference that its assumptions and conclusions have no bearing on the solid realities of their familiarity. To spare my feelings or avoid discomfiture at having to dismiss what i have so obviously put much thought into, they choose silence. Maybe i will go away. Unfortunately, the hydra-headed monster of the present and mounting crisis will not.

Progressive, leftist and liberal economists with whose work i am familiar, such as Herman Daly, Bernard Lietaer, David Korten and Gar Alperovitz, remain staunchly moneytheistic, nary an agnostic doubt arising to cloud their critical but clearly monetary vision. In the same way perhaps that Christianity held sway in some minds for such a long time that it became conflated with religion, so monetarism appears to be the only form of economics. This would make primitivists, followers of Adam Smith, Keynes, the Austrian School, Schumacher and Friedman alike, all adherents, but of different denominations of the Church Monetary. Ecological economists’ calls for no-growth, carbon reduction, regulations, community participation, co-ops and localization are essential elements for achieving a steady-state economy but those are only a part of the answer, the major portion of which has to be a systemic change.

The only sounds of apostasy are coming from the fringe, voices from the edge. Jacque Fresco and The Venus Project, promoted by Peter Joseph and the Zeitgeist Movement are the main protestants calling for the abolition of money. The ascetics would be Mark Boyle, Heidemarie Schwermer and others who have withdrawn to their personal hermitages. They all bring a philosophical and visionary weight to the movement toward transformation. For that movement to be successful it will need to reach and convert a mass of ordinary folk who recognize the critical danger we are in and are prepared to countenance the hitherto unthinkable.

To abandon moneytheism is the beginning of new life for the world and all that is in it.